April 2011

April 21, 2011

Yesterday, in our post about the death of filmmaker/photographer Tim Hetherington, we included his recent nonfiction short, DIARY. The film has been playing at festivals over the past year (including at Full Frame last weekend), and it screened at New York's Stranger Than Fiction series on February 1.

Here's Thom Powers interviewing Hetherington at the Q&A after the film:

On the Stranger Than Fiction blog, Thom also posted a eulogy for Chris Hondros, the Getty Images photographer who was also killed in yesterday's attack, someone that Powers has known for many years:

He was my favorite dinner companion, possessing a rare perspective on what’s happening in the world, but also a good listener. He was quick-witted. He liked teaching. He took interest in other people’s work. One of his last Facebook messages was to congratulate colleagues who had won awards.

He didn’t have the self-destructive bent that characterizes some war reporters. He could plan ahead. We were plotting an event in Toronto this June to show his Tahrir Square photos. He was going to get married in August. Outsiders might consider his whole profession foolhardy. But I think he considered it a privilege, albeit a dangerous one. He told an interviewer, “you see humanity at its worst, but to me it’s balanced by the fact that you also see humanity at its best. I’ve seen such examples of courage and human generosity.”

There have been a number of tributes to Hetherington and Hondros, including individual posts on the NY Times' LensBlog (Hetherington's is here, Hondros is here).

April 20, 2011

[Tim Hetherington, center, at January's Cinema Eye Honors, where he was nominated for Outstanding Production and Audience Choice Prize. Photo by Deneka Peniston.]

This morning, we were devastated to hear the news that Tim Hetherington, the acclaimed war photographer, journalist and Oscar-nominated co-director of RESTREPO, had been killed in Libya earlier today in the besieged city of Misrata. Hetherington was one of four journalists to be hit by a rocket-propelled grenade - at least two others, including Getty photographer Chris Hondros, were gravely injured and clinging to life.

In an interview the day he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, with co-director Sebastian Junger, Hetherington related that a journalist had asked the filmmakers whether being nominated was something they thought about while filming in Afghanistan. Junger replied, "Well, actually the foremost thing in my head was not to get killed."

In December, we spoke to Hetherington and Junger about their work on the film and I asked Junger what he had learned from working with Hetherington:

"I learned a lot. I mean, writers don’t necessarily think in visual terms and, so, Tim was just aware of things. He was just aware of the visual world in a way that I wasn’t. Once there was a very boring afternoon and nothing was happening. There hadn’t been a firefight in a week, everyone was hot and I was just completely zoned out. And everyone was asleep, everyone in the outpost was asleep practically. It was like mid-afternoon nap, just the buzz of flies and that’s it. And Tim was creeping around photographing all the sleeping soldiers. And for me it was the epitome of a moment where nothing was happening, there was no story to record, and Tim was like, “When do you ever see soldiers asleep, nobody ever sees soldiers asleep. This is awesome.” And I realized, oh my God, everything has a value. So, as a result, I wrote a paragraph about what’s it’s like to be at an outpost where everyone’s asleep. And that paragraph’s in the book. So that was just one example of the little ways that we affected each other. And Tim would think really conceptually about things – as a journalist, I think in a kind of linear fashion and Tim would really think conceptually, like what’s the emotional experience out here. He would organize his thoughts in a way that wasn’t linear, it was something else. And that was one of the reasons I divided my book into “Fear”, “Killing” and “Love”. I was trying to figure out a narrative for the book and literally I was like, OK, do like Tim does. Think about it conceptually, not linearly. That’s two of the many things that rubbed off on me."

April 01, 2011

BILL CUNNINGHAM NEW YORK, the much-buzzed-about documentary about the octogenarian New York street/fashion photographer that has been setting box office records at New York's Film Forum, is set to test the waters around the country this weeked. Openings in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Missouri and Rhode Island - along with adding additional theaters in the New York and Los Angeles markets - are the first step in a planned expansion that could ultimately bring the film to more than 100 theaters in the US.

In fact, the film is poised to become Zeitgeist's highest grossing documentary since 2004's THE CORPORATION. The company is well known for being perhaps the most important distributor of prestige docs (THE OATH, LAST TRAIN HOME, TROUBLE THE WATER, UP THE YANGTZE), but they rarely have had a pop breakout like BILL CUNNINGHAM NEW YORK.

The opening at NY's Film Forum was a true sensation, grossing nearly $50K in its five-day opening, which proved a record for the landmark downtown art house. BCNY topped the previous record holder, VALENTINO: THE LAST EMPEROR, by a sizable amount - VALENTINO took in $33K in it's first 5-day frame. VALENTINO, which was self-distributed through Truly Indie and Vitagraph, ultimately took in more than $1.75M.